Several years ago we did Passport to Reading. Every class chose a country to study and every child made a passport. We hung flags representing our country outside our class doors. Students took turns visiting the various "countries". At the visits the teachers became the "locals" and we dressed up and played our parts. Some teachers served food from their country, some read a story from that country, and some did craft projects that represented the country. Passports were stamped when visits were made. (We carved stamps using large rubber erasers.) By the end of the month students had gotten 20 stamps in their passports. We read about countries, did reports and virtual visits. We used die-cut shapes that represented our countries, for instance, a shape of something from that country, and hung the shapes in the hallways. One shape for each book read. Our kick-off assembly was folktales around the room. It was a blast, the kids learned a lot, and now we do this every few years.
We make March a very special month! This year our theme was the Rainforest!
We started the week with our Principal dressed up as a gorilla and we announced over our PA that a gorilla had escaped from the rainforest and to keep an eye out for it. Our Principal snuck up on each classroom.
Each room decorated their doors and who ever decorated won a prize.
We also had a week of a Mystery Reader (parents) they would show up in a classroom first thing in the morning to read a story about the rainforest.
We had another week of Mystery Reader over our PA system our readers were teachers, adminstrators, aides, lunch ladies, janitor ect.
We had a rock and roll into reading assembly, we also had Michael Monroe (illustrator) at another assembly.
We gave each room an egg to grow that hatched a rainforest snake! Not real but they all loved it!
We ended the month with a Family Pajama Night! Everyone wore PJ's and in several rooms we had arts and crafts of rainforest items for them to do. We gave them each a bag when they came and as they left each room they had their craft and a rainforest prize it was like trick or treating. We read a Rainforest story in each room as they were doing their craft. We had an excellent turn out!
OOPs forgot to tell you it cost us about 400 dollars. We also have enough books left to almost play again. So if you get lucky and get a deal on your books and charge a dollar you won't have a very expensive evening.
Sorry everyone, having trouble with my email..
For all the reqests about the Books for Bingo.
Here goes! Books came from Scholastic. 100 books for $ 99.00. WE played for books and no door prizes. We served pop, chips pretzels etc. No charge to play on our first one. Kids get a book no matter what. that was what we drawed every 5 miutes for a child to receive a book. We had 50/50 tickets they put their names on. The teachers kept track of checking the bingo cards when someone bingo. More than one person could bingo each time. We played 2 cards to starts. After 10 games we played 3 each for 10 games.
The teachers sent home a notice to explain how it worked and ask for you to fill out if you plan to attend. The gave them an idea how many were coming. If you need to charge admission, we are going to charge a dollar for each person on our next one. This just helps off set the cost of books. You could ask local business for money donations to help pay for your books, or for your door prizes if you wanted to give them.
Students got to play bingo also. Some parents had to help them. We had parents who never come to anything come to this. We had a great turn out and a great time.
Our school has 101 students. We had 56 of our students plus older and younger brothers and sisters come. Grandparents came to.
Something that our school did last year to promote reading was to host a "Book Ball". We had the students read a minimum of 1200 minutes (could be reading books, newspapers, menus, anything). They had to track their minutes on a tracking sheet (signed by parents) and turned in at the end of every week for eight weeks. We gave the students who were "on-track" at weeks two, four and six little "rewards" for doing a great job and finally at week eight those who read their 1200 minutes earned an invitation to our Book Ball. The PTO sponsored the Ball with a literary characters theme and our volunteers dressed as characters (such as Dorothy from "Oz", the Queen of Hearts, etc.). There was a DJ, prizes and awards for different levels of reading accomplishments by students, food (of course) and each student who attended got to take home a photo of themselves with their favorite character. We created a database to track the minutes of each student and had approx. one-third of our school attend. The students were amazed and the parents were enlightened at the level of planning that went into this Ball. This year we are planning our second annual Book Ball in March and having a theme of "Under The Sea". It was the most talked about event of last year and have already heard buzz about "are you going to have another one?" It was great to do something educational for the school without having the principal get on the roof ... where in our neck of the woods actually caused problems in area schools with students trying it at home and getting hurt.
